`How do you think I got here? I rubbed the lads a little. Franco, listen to me. This is important. My mistress, the Marchesa di Artegiana, has to talk to the cardinal. Believe me, it is very important.'
'Who is the Marchesa di Artegiana?'
`Didn't you hear? She is Signora Manovale! The emperor made her a marchesa!'
Manovale?'
'Franco, we can't talk here all night. She is waiting out there and a patrol might come upon her and stick a sword into her just for fun.'
'All right. Okay. Bring her here.
The doorkeeper, her name was Michela, went back into the darkness, then reappeared a few minutes later with Manovale that is to say, with the Marchesa di Artegiana.!
'Franco!' she said softly, putting her arms around me and kissing me full on the lips, rubbing her crotch into mine as if we were longtime lovers. I had shaken hands with her a couple of times, but no more. 'How wonderful to see you again.' It was nice, and skilfully done. She let me go and stepped backwards only slightly. 'I have information that can change the war,' she said. `I must talk to the cardinal.'
'Are you really a marchesa?' I asked her mockingly.
She nodded solemnly. `The emperor honoured me,' she said simply.
I went into the tent to awaken Cossa.
'Franco Ellera! For Christ's sake, it is still dark!' he said.
`There is a woman here, Cossa,' Franco Ellera said urgently. `Very beautiful. Very rich. She passed right through our lines and no one stopped her. It must have cost her a fortune. She came right to this tent. She knew the right tent. She is unarmed I made sure of that. She wants to talk to you. She says she has information which could change the war.'
'Beautiful and rich? Send her in in ten minutes.'
When Cossa was dressed, he opened the flap of the tent and motioned to me. I showed in the marchesa, a tall, hooded fgure, and left them. The doorkeeper and I got back to old times and her hips had never lost their skill.
This is what happened inside the tent at the first meeting between Cossa and Decima Manovale. It is exactly as Cossa told it to me.
The marchesa threw back her hood and Cossa was axed, by her beauty. She was tall, large and deep-chested, having a cap of odd-looking golden hair, very white skin dusted with sun spots and large deep-blue eyes which came up like stars behind her high cheekbones. Cossa stared into her face and she became imprinted, upon his mind and spirit. It may have been the light, the wood fire and two candles. It may have been the fault of his transformation from the half-death of sleep into a place which seemed like a dream, but the strange beauty of the woman had a bewitching force upon him. Cossa had forgotten his army and his rewarding Church. He had forgotten the woman who had felled him at Perugia. He had almost forgotten, his ambitions. He stared at her like a country boy peering from behind a barn as she dropped the cloak, showing him the strong, white outline of her shoulders and the rising, half-bare bodice above a shimmering green dress.
`Your Eminence,' she said with a Pisan accent, speaking as if she were unaware of her effect upon him. She reached for the, hand which hung at his side, lifted it and kissed his ring. Returning the hand to its limp place, she said, `I am the Marchesa di Artegiana, at your orders.'
Cossa came to himself again. He pulled her down upon a bench and sat close to her, smelling her, touching, her arms and hands. `Why did you come here?' he asked.
She held his hand loosely, caressing the soft flesh under his wrist, and peered out at him from over the tops of her cheekbones like a sniper working high up from behind a rock, let her lips, slacken into an expression of sincere lust and said, `Last night in Padua, Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, died in my arms, of the plague. A huge comet appeared in, the sky as he lay dying.."I thank God," he said, "that the sign of my recall appears in the heavens for all men to see." Gian Galeazzo is dead, Eminence,' she said in a soft, provoking voice. `I have come to tell you to march on Milan with your army. My; people have already seen to it that, if you march by Reggio and Parma, they will greet you as their liberator. The citizens of Brescia, Cremona, Lodi, Placentia and Bergamo will revolt from Milan and take their independence. In Milan, the duchess and her son will wall themselves up in the citadel, but she will tell the city to come to terms with you because, the wives of your generals are her sisters.'
`How do you know these things?'
`I was close to Gian Galeazzo. My department ranked with Francesco Barbavara's who ran his chancery.'
`Your department?' He leered at her, giving it lewd meaning, as if he were startled that a department which called for laying on her back with her legs spread wide, with her knees lifted, could have ranked with Barbavara's.
'It is right that you mock me,' she said, `but I ran Galeazzo's agents who supplied political information from all over Italy and Europe. I ran his agents in Aragon, Burgundy, Germany, and twice among the Turks. I ran his agents at the court of Sigismund, King of Hungary, and close to Wenzel, the emperor.' Cossa believed her story; but I didn't when it was told to me.'
`What did you learn about me?'
`That you adore women. That thoughts of coupling are on your mind most of the time.'
He showed her what a Cossa smile really was.
When the marchesa had stood away from Gian Galeazzo's corpse, she had seen what she must do, she told Bernaba months later. She had secured Milan for the Medici bank, but if the papal armies conquered the north of Italy because Gian Galeazzo's talisman was not there to ward them off, then all that good work, and her tithe, could-go to waste. Better to protect the new Milanese deposits by persuading the commander of the papal armies to transfer the money of Bologna and all the cities of the papal states into the Medici bank along with Milanese florins. Gian Galeazzo's death had been necessary. She was now established at the Medici bank as being entitled to a full tithe. She could now advance Giovanni di Bicci di Medici's plan to secure all the Church's banking. She saw that she must go instantly to the papal army's commander. The commander would have to be grateful to her. He would have to cooperate with the Medici bank.
That the commander turned out to be a wiry, compact, elegant ruffian who was also a cardinal amused her and stimulated her the more.
`Where will you go from here?' he asked.
'I go with you, my lord, to aid in your conquest.'
He put his hands into her bodice and lifted out her breasts. Better our conquest than anyone's, dear lady,' he said.
Cossa left a token force at the gates of Bologna to remind the
occupying Milanese troops that their work: was: over. He rode through the cities between Bologna and Milan taking cheers. A peace was written with the Council of Milan. The pope instructed Cossa not to include his allies, the Florentines, in the peace, although they had expended 80;000 florins on the war, because he had learned that `a Florentine bank' had financed Gian Galeazzo in making the war, and also he did not wish to share Cossa's loot and ransom money with them. Despite this betrayal, the Florentines showed no rancour towards Cossa, because the Marchesa di Artegiana had confirmed to Cosimo di Medici that she saw qualities in Cossa which could be fortunate for the bank, so Giovanni di Bicci di Medici extolled Cossa eloquently in his speech before the Signoria of Florence.
Part Two
17
Cossa was besotted with the marchesa. I had seen him almost as insanely affected years before, when we had left the red-haired woman on the bed in Perugia and I had made him ride on to Rome; but he was older now and, after the stint at the Vatican, a far more worldly man, who, anyone would have thought, should have been less paralytically susceptible than the marchesa had revealed him to be. He wanted her at his side at all times. He could not keep his hands off her. He could stare at her for embarrassingly long, moments, as a hen stares at a white chalk line on the ground. He heaped jewels on her. When the temperature dropped, he ordered furs to be brought for her. He was on her and in her like an unbalanced satyr, moaning, talking brokenly. I must have lost two hours' sleep every night because of the noises he made on that woman.